Missing Submersible: Rescuers Detect ‘Underwater Noise’ in Search Area and Redirect Efforts

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that some of the remote-operated vehicles involved in the search had been relocated in an attempt to determine the origin of the sounds.

This blog has ended. Follow Thursday’s live coverage of the missing submersible.

Mike Ives, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Jenny Gross, Jenna Russell and Jesus Jiménez

A Canadian surveillance aircraft looking for the missing Titan submersible and the five people on board in the North Atlantic has “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the U.S. Coast Guard said early Wednesday.

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that remote-operated vehicles were still searching for the Titan. Officials in the United States and Canada did not immediately respond to requests for further comment late Tuesday.

An international team of rescuers has been racing to search for the Titan in an area of the ocean larger than Connecticut. Aircraft from the United States and Canada have been scanning the surface, and sonar buoys have been pinging the depths. The Titan was thought to have less than two days of oxygen remaining as of Tuesday.

Even if the Titan can be located — in a remote patch of ocean where the seafloor lies more than two miles below the choppy surface — retrieving it might not be easy. To recover objects off the seafloor, the U.S. Navy uses a remote-operated vehicle that can reach depths of 20,000 feet. But ships that carry such a vehicle normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour, and the Titanic wreck lies about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

The submersible was more than halfway into what should have been a two-and-a-half-hour dive to the ruins of the Titanic when it lost contact with a chartered research ship on Sunday morning. Leaders in the submersible craft industry had warned for years of possible “catastrophic” problems with the craft’s design and worried that the Titan had not followed standard certification procedures.

Here’s what to know:

The vessel was operated by OceanGate Expeditions, which has provided tours of the Titanic wreck since 2021. Spots in the tours go for a price of up to $250,000 as part of a booming high-risk travel industry.

In 2018, more than three dozen people, including oceanographers, submersible company executives and deep-sea explorers, warned that they had “unanimous concern” about the craft’s design and worried that the Titan had not followed standard certification procedures. In a 2019 blog post, the company said that “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, was piloting the submersible, according to the company. The other four occupants are Hamish Harding, a British businessman and explorer; the British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman; and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French maritime expert who has been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

Victoria Kim, Salman Masood and Yonette Joseph contributed reporting.

Mike Ives and Yonette Joseph

A Canadian surveillance aircraft looking for the missing Titan submersible in the North Atlantic “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the United States Coast Guard said early Wednesday.

The Coast Guard said in a brief statement on Twitter that some of the remote-operated vehicles involved in the search had been relocated in an attempt to determine the origin of the sounds. Those searches had so far “yielded negative results” but were continuing, the statement said.

Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue. 1/2

The Coast Guard said the Canadian aircraft was a P-3 surveillance plane, a model that is used for maritime patrol and support operations around the world. Data from the aircraft has been shared with the U.S. Navy for further analysis, it said.

The Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian military did not immediately respond to requests for comment. News of underwater noises in the search area was reported earlier by Rolling Stone magazine and CNN.

An international team of rescuers has been looking for the Titan in area of water larger than Connecticut. Aircraft from the United States and Canada have been scanning the surface, and sonar buoys have been deployed in the water. The Titan was thought to have less than a day of oxygen remaining as of Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the president of the Explorers Club, a New York-based organization, sent club members a letter that said sonar in the search area had “detected potential ‘tapping sounds’ implying that the crew may be alive and signaling” at 2 a.m. local time. The club’s president, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, did not elaborate.

In a statement posted to Twitter later on Tuesday, he said that “likely signs of life have been detected at the site.” He added that the club was working for approval to deploy a remote-operated vehicle in the search area that was capable of descending to depths of 6,000 meters, or nearly 20,000 feet.

Trevor Hale, a spokesman for the club, declined to comment on the record in a brief phone interview early Wednesday morning. One of the five people aboard the Titan, the British explorer Hamish Harding, is a board member of the club.

North

Atlantic

Ocean

Polar Prince

canada

newfoundland

u.s.

North Atlantic

Ocean

Wreck of

the Titanic

500 miles

Skandi Vinland

Deep Energy

Atalante

The Canadian vessel

Horizon Arctic deployed

a remote-operated vehicle

that discovered a debris field.

Bow

Stern

Boiler

The Titanic wreckage

sits on the ocean

floor, approximately

12,500 feet down.

2,000 ft.

North

Atlantic

Ocean

Polar Prince

canada

newfoundland

North Atlantic Ocean

u.s.

Wreck of

the Titanic

500 miles

500 miles

Skandi Vinland

Deep Energy

Atalante

The Canadian vessel

Horizon Arctic deployed

a remote-operated vehicle

that discovered a debris field

containing remains of the Titan.

Bow

The Titanic wreckage

sits on the ocean

floor, approximately

12,500 feet down.

Stern

Boiler

2,000 ft.

Note: Vessel positions are as of 11 a.m. Eastern Thursday.

Sources: United States Coast Guard; MarineTraffic; “The Discovery of the Titanic” by Robert D. Ballard (locations of Titanic wreckage)

By Scott Reinhard and Julie Walton Shaver

The New York Times

The Titan submersible that went missing over the weekend in the remote North Atlantic is the most lightweight and cost-efficient deep-sea submersible ever made, according to OceanGate Expeditions, the Everett, Wash.-based company that developed it.

Here are details that the company has shared about the vessel.

Capacity: Five people (one pilot and four crew members)

Maximum depth: 13,123 feet

Dimensions: 22 feet long, 9.2 feet wide, 8.3 feet high

Weight: 21,000 pounds

Pressure vessel materials: Carbon fiber and titanium

Speed: 3 knots (about 3.45 miles per hour), with propulsion by four electric thrusters

Life support: 96 hours for five people

Mike Ives

The five people aboard the missing deep-sea submersible Titan are not the first to risk their lives for a chance to glimpse one of history’s most famous shipwrecks.

More than a century after the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic during its first voyage from Britain to New York, the disaster continues to fascinate people like few other episodes in history.

The Titanic, the world’s largest steamship at the time, made headlines when it went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, killing 1,500 people. It had been packed with glamorous guests and was called “unsinkable” by officials of the company that operated it.

For decades afterward, it was the holy grail of undiscovered shipwrecks and the subject of much storytelling, including “A Night to Remember,” Walter Lord’s best-selling 1955 book.

The mystique endured even after the wreck of the Titanic was found on the sea floor in 1985. Two years later, Mr. Lord was a speaker at a Titanic tribute event aboard a chartered yacht in New York that included a five-piece band like the one that had played for doomed passengers on the Titanic’s stern. In 1997, the James Cameron film “Titanic,” starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, introduced the tragedy to a new generation.

Today, young people are watching conversations about the Titanic unfold on social media — including on the short-form video app TikTok, where established facts about the disaster merge with misinformation and manipulated content.

Advances in deep-sea submersible technology have made it possible to travel to the wreck itself. With tickets for the Titan voyage priced at $250,000, the trip is not for everyone, and some critics object to the very idea of visiting an underwater gravesite. Even so, the trips are popular enough to sustain a booming mini-industry.

The company that owns the Titan submersible, OceanGate, has been taking tourists to the Titanic wreck since 2021. It said in a 2019 news release that slots were being booked by “citizen explorers seeking an adventurous, scientific and meaningful experience.”

This year, the company announced that five expeditions, each lasting eight days, were planned for 2023, and another five for 2024.

“This is your chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary,” the company said. “Become one of the few to see the Titanic with your own eyes.”

Shawn Hubler

A former national security official who operated deep-dive submersibles for the U.S. Navy said on Tuesday that piloting a vessel like the one that rescuers are searching for in the North Atlantic was like navigating in outer space.

“You are a long way from anything that can give you help,” said Jeff Eggers, a former Navy commander who spent four years piloting military mini-submarines that were similar in size to the missing submersible, called the Titan, but more technologically sophisticated. “You’re incredibly reliant on the integrity of the vessel. And you’re dependent on the resources you’ve built into the craft.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Eggers, who retired from the military in 2013 after two decades of service and served as special assistant for national security affairs in the Obama administration, said the public tended to underappreciate the perils inherent in excursions like the one undertaken by Titan, which went missing on Sunday en route to the ruins of the Titanic.

Among other things, he said, the civilian-operated submersible appeared to lack significant safeguards that the Navy requires, including an escape hatch, so that even if the Titan managed to surface, its occupants would be unable to exit the craft on their own.

Other risks are a constant concern in submersibles, he added, including potential malfunctions with the ballast systems; failures in the vessel’s inner pressure hull, which is shaped like a hot dog and can crack catastrophically under the extreme weight of the ocean; and electrical fires and failures, which tend to knock out the ability to communicate and maneuver.

“We had a lot of redundancy and safety engineered into our submersibles,” he said of the Navy submersibles that he operated. “There’s much less oversight in the civilian context.”

Leaders in the submersible craft industry have long warned that the Titan’s design posed potentially serious problems.

“The conditions at those depths are unforgiving,” Mr. Eggers said. “It’s like operating a small spacecraft.”

William J. Broad

Many vessels that descend into the sunless depths of the sea for scientific exploration are sturdy behemoths with proven engineering and track records for safety.

But Titan, the lost submersible from the company OceanGate, is a technological maverick based on novel concepts that differ from standard designs. Moreover, unlike most deep-sea craft, Titan has undergone no certification by a reputable marine group that does such licensing work for other craft, including one built by OceanGate that dives to shallower depths.

“It suggests they were cutting corners,” said Bruce H. Robison, a senior marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, who has explored the ocean’s depths with more than a dozen different kinds of submersibles.

Alfred S. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner and president emeritus of the Explorers Club of New York City, agreed. “I’ve had three people ask me about making a dive on it,” he said in reference to the lost submersible. “And I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ I wouldn’t do it in a million years.”

When asked to respond to questions about the certification of Titan, a spokesman for OceanGate said in an email, “We are unable to provide any additional information at this time.”

As a class, submersibles go down for hours, not days or months, and rely on a mother ship for support, communications, sustenance for the crew, as well as sleeping bunks and proper toilets.

Whether dependable old designs or innovative newer models, all the craft face the crushing pressures of the abyss — at the level of the Titanic’s resting place, three tons per square inch. They thus face strict requirements for risk avoidance, if not the flat-out assurance of crew and equipment safety.

Private vessels — those used on superyachts, exploratory craft, tourists jaunts — are not formally regulated by any governmental or intergovernmental agency. Nor do they meet the rigorous standards that are applied to deep-sea craft used by the United States Navy and other government agencies.

Even so, the best of the private submersible class undergo extensive testing, certification and ratings for particular depths by such organizations as Lloyd’s Register, a British company that specializes in assessing the quality of oceangoing equipment for the maritime industry. In the industry this is known as classing.

Titan — the 22-foot long submersible that disappeared on Sunday while diving to the Titanic — is unlike most submersibles in that its passenger hull is made of two very different materials. It’s composed of a mix of carbon fiber and titanium, producing a craft significantly lighter than submersibles made primarily of steel or titanium, a lightweight, high-strength metal.

The dissimilar types of materials used in the craft’s hull construction “raise structural concerns,” said Dr. McLaren, who has twice dived on submersibles to the Titanic. “They have different coefficients of expansion and compression, and that works against keeping a watertight bond.”

On its website, the submersible’s owner, OceanGate, a private company in Everett, Wash., says the vessel’s light weight and its launch and recovery platform significantly cut transport and operating costs, making Titan “a more financially viable option for individuals interested in exploring the deep.” Even so, the passenger cost on the current Titanic dive was $250,000.

Titan’s novel construction features also make it incapable of being certified, according to the company. OceanGate explains the craft’s unlicensed (what the industry calls unclassed or uncertified) status on its website as reflecting the vessel’s cutting-edge technologies, rather than a sign of shortcuts or inadequacies that could jeopardize safety.

“The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure,” the company said on its website. “As a result, simply focusing on classing the vessel does not address the operational risks. Maintaining high-level operational safety requires constant, committed effort and a focused corporate culture — two things that OceanGate takes very seriously and that are not assessed during classification.”

The company did, however, say that one of its other submersibles has completed a safety certification. Antipodes goes down 1,000 feet, a tiny fraction of the Titanic’s depth, which is some two and a half miles. Like Titan, it has been used for tourist dives. Its certification was performed by the American Bureau of Shipping, a marine industry giant based in Houston.

In an interview, Jennifer Mire, a spokesperson for the American Bureau of Shipping, said the company had done no evaluation of the larger submersible. “We don’t have any connection to the Titan,” she said.

OceanGate, in explaining Titan’s lack of certification on its website, said that groups like Lloyd’s Register and the American Bureau of Shipping “often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon-fiber pressure vessels and a real-time hull health monitoring system.”

Dr. McLaren said the company’s line of reasoning was unpersuasive and that the innovative nature of the craft made certification even more important. Knowing that it was uncertified, he said, was enough to make him “run in the opposite direction.”

Triton Submarines, an American company that makes innovative submersibles with transparent hulls to give passengers a panoramic view of the abyss, calls vehicle certification one of the company’s founding principles.

“We are proud that every submersible delivered remains in active service and certified to its original design depth,” it says on the company’s website. “Every Triton ever completed has passed certification.”

Christine Chung

The ongoing search and rescue effort for the missing Titan submersible with five people on board, involving a huge response from American, Canadian and French authorities, is vast in scale, including both the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard.

The expense for such an endeavor is likely to be equally great, and it is unclear whether taxpayers in the countries involved, ultimately, will be required to pay it. The passengers aboard the submersible paid $250,000 each for the experience of diving to the Titanic.

“These people paid a lot of money to do something extraordinarily risky and hard to recover from,” said Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue, a nonprofit that focuses on wilderness rescues. The rescue mission, he said, would “probably cost millions.”

In the United States, search and rescue efforts — who conducts them and who pays for them — depend on where you get lost, Mr. Boyer said. Some states, like New Hampshire, charge individuals for rescues if the people are determined to have been reckless.

Cynthia Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service, said in a statement that the agency does not charge for search and rescue operations that occur within its parks because it considers them a public service. The park service conducted 3,428 search and rescues last year.

But, she said, when the cost of search and rescue efforts “crosses a certain threshold, funds may be diverted from N.P.S. funds for other types of programs or projects.”

It is unknown whether OceanGate Expeditions, the company that provided the excursion to the Titanic ruins, required its participants to sign up for any trip insurance.

The organizers of risky and adventurous expeditions, including operators like Abercrombie & Kent and Black Tomato, said that they require extensive insurance policies. Peter Anderson, managing director of the luxury concierge service Knightsbridge Circle, said the company works with services like Covac Global that can “evacuate and repatriate our members for medical emergencies.” But even the minimum policy, $100,000, would not come close to paying for the current efforts.

The Coast Guard did not immediately respond to questions about the expense of past extensive search and rescue efforts.

In 2021, it rescued Cyril Derreumaux, an experienced kayaker who was about a week into an attempt to paddle 2,400 nautical miles from the California coast to Hawaii. The Coast Guard estimated his rescue, which involved a helicopter and at least one diver, cost $42,000, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.

Mr. Derreumaux, who lives in Marin County, Calif., and is now 46, emphasized in an interview that his goal was to fulfill a dream and that he was not a tourist who had undertaken the venture with minimal training. He received backlash after being rescued, he said, with some people saying that the effort was costly and unnecessary. A stranger even sent him a Venmo request for tens of thousands of dollars, Mr. Derreumaux said.

Mr. Derreumaux said he was thankful to the Coast Guard for saving his life, along with the lives of many others in need of its help.

“I would not have called the Coast Guard if it weren’t a life-threatening situation,” he said.

He attempted the trip again the following year. This time, he was successful.

“I knew I had what it takes to do it,” he said. “I think it’s part of the human spirit of trying to do things that are really hard for what it teaches us about human resilience, determination and to do things that maybe don’t make sense.”

Of the Titan’s passengers, Mr. Derreumaux said: “Their lives are worth saving.”

Claire Fahy contributed reporting.

Anushka Patil and Jacey Fortin

Passengers seeking a glimpse of the R.M.S. Titanic aboard the submersible that disappeared in the North Atlantic this week have endured hours in a dangerous drop to the ocean floor aboard a cramped craft with a single porthole.

Mike Reiss, a producer and writer for “The Simpsons,” boarded the vessel, known as the Titan, last summer. He said that passengers were required to sign a waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page.

Passengers on his 10-hour journey — a trip that can cost up to $250,000 — were composed but excited, he said. Sandwiches and water were available on the vessel, but he recalled being told that many passengers did not eat during the journey because of excitement, and that the rudimentary toilet on board had never been used.

OceanGate Expeditions, which operates the vessel, has described the trip on its website as a “thrilling and unique travel experience.” The company did not immediately respond to a request for more information on Tuesday.

The Titan is a tight fit. David Pogue, a CBS reporter and former New York Times tech columnist who has been on board, described the cylinder as “about the size of a minivan.”

Images from OceanGate show a vessel with an interior like a metal tube, where passengers can sit on the flat floor with their backs to the curved walls. There is some overhead lighting but no chairs, and little room to move or stand upright.

Still, Mr. Reiss, who had previously traveled with OceanGate Expeditions to see Hudson Canyon off the shores of New York City, described the journey to the Titanic as “very comfortable” and said he fell asleep during the quiet, dimly lit descent. “You just drop like a stone for two and a half hours,” he said.

As the submersible made its way to the Titanic, Mr. Reiss said, it was carried off course by underwater currents. The compass was “acting very weird,” he recalled, and the team knew only that they were about 500 yards from where they should have been.

Still, the Titan, which could spend only three hours on the ocean floor, managed to arrive at the wreck with roughly 20 minutes to spare for what Mr. Reiss called a quick “photo op.” He was able to see the sunken ship through the porthole, which he described as the size of a washing machine window.

The wreck was “the biggest thing in the world,” he said, “but you’re in such darkness, you just don’t know where it is going to be.”

John Ismay

The hunt for a deep-diving submersible last seen slipping beneath the waves to visit the wreckage of the R.M.S. Titanic on Sunday now involves the coast guards of both the United States and Canada. But finding a single object on the bottom of the ocean is no easy task.

The U.S. Coast Guard is facing extreme logistical challenges as it races to find and reach the Titan. The five people inside the submersible were believed to have roughly 40 hours of breathable air left as of early Tuesday afternoon, Coast Guard officials said.

While the U.S. and Canadian militaries have deployed rescue craft by both air and sea, the job of locating the Titan may ultimately fall to civilian undersea explorers, who typically use technologies in tandem to search the seafloor and identify objects.

To scan large areas of water, devices called autonomous underwater vehicles are often used. Before being placed into the water, these torpedo-like robots are programmed with the boundaries of a search area. They then dive and propel themselves at a preset altitude above the bottom, radiating sonar waves.

The emitters, called side-scan sonars, have evolved to produce fairly detailed imagery of objects on the bottom that can be analyzed once the vehicles are brought back aboard a mother ship and their data is downloaded. Those missions can take hours to complete, depending on the size of the area being searched.

Using the analysis of those sonar images, explorers may find areas of interest, often based on features like straight lines and right angles that indicate a man-made object.

The extreme depths involved pose a challenge. Divers wearing specialized equipment can safely reach depths of just a few hundred feet below the surface before having to spend long amounts of time decompressing on the way back up. A couple hundred feet deeper, and darkness reigns.

The Titanic lies at a depth in the North Atlantic that humans can reach only while inside specialized submersibles that keep their occupants warm, dry and supplied with breathable air.

Searchers can send down a type of uncrewed device called a remote-operated vehicle, which is controlled by a human operator on the surface and has optical cameras that send a constant video feed through an umbilical line to the mother ship. Such vehicles often have gripper arms that can pick up objects on the seafloor.

Advanced vehicles like the U.S. Navy’s CURV-21 can dive to 20,000 feet underwater and can use gripper arms to delicately thread straps and lifting lines to objects so they can be winched to the surface by cranes aboard a salvage ship.

But getting that kind of equipment to the site takes time. The Titanic’s wreck is about 370 miles south of Newfoundland, and the kinds of ships that can carry a vehicle like the Navy’s deepest-diving robot normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour.

In many submersibles, the air inside is recycled — carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is added — but on a long enough timeline, the vessel will lose the ability to scrub enough carbon dioxide, and the air inside will no longer sustain life.

If the Titan’s batteries run down and are no longer able to run heaters that keep the occupants warm in the freezing deep, the people inside can become hypothermic. Should the submersible’s pressure hull fail, the end for those inside would be certain and quick.

Daniel Victor

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions and one of the five occupants of the submersible missing this week in the North Atlantic, has advocated for deep-seas tourism in the face of criticism.

His company proceeded with its tours despite the “unanimous concern” expressed by three dozen industry leaders in 2018. In an interview last year, he told The New York Times that high-resolution footage gathered on the Titanic tours could benefit researchers.

“No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” Mr. Rush said. “There are other sites that are newer and probably of greater scientific value.”

In the interview, he defended the price tag — seats in the Titan cost up to $250,000.

“For those who think it’s expensive, it’s a fraction of the cost of going to space, and it’s very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,” said Mr. Rush, who founded OceanGate in 2009. “And the folks who don’t like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that’s the only way anything gets done in this world.”

By some accounts, Mr. Rush has been a charismatic booster of submersible trips. Mike Reiss, a writer and producer of “The Simpsons,” who took a trip in a different OceanGate submersible that was piloted by Mr. Rush, compared him on Tuesday to Henry Ford and the Wright brothers, describing him as “a magnetic man” who is “the last of the great American dreamers.”

Craig Howard, a longtime friend of Mr. Rush’s, said on Tuesday that just before he left Newfoundland for the Titanic site, Mr. Rush told him he was excited for this year’s dives.

“And there was always a ‘next dive,’” he said.

Mr. Rush is a descendant of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton. He graduated from Princeton with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984, according to his company biography. In 1989, he personally built an experimental aircraft that he continues to fly, the company said.

In a segment on “CBS Sunday Morning” that aired in November 2022, Mr. Rush told the interviewer, David Pogue, that he grew up wanting to be an astronaut and, after he earned his degree, a fighter pilot.

“I had this epiphany that I didn’t want — it wasn’t about going to space,” Mr. Rush said. “It was about exploring. It was about finding new life forms. I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk. I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe.”

Anushka Patil and Emma Bubola contributed reporting.

Matthew Bloch, Keith Collins and Scott Reinhard

The Sycamore was

approximately 975 miles

from the wreckage

at 10:54 a.m. Wednesday.

CANADA

Ann Harvey and

Terry Fox at

around 11:00 a.m.

Wednesday

Newfoundland

The Polar Prince, John Cabot

and three other vessels

were within 26 miles

of the wreckage by around

11:00 a.m. Wednesday.

Glace Bay

at 10:50 p.m.

Tuesday

Atalante at

11:09 a.m.

Wednesday

The Titanic wreckage

sits on the ocean

floor, approximately

12,500 feet down.

North Atlantic

Ocean

200 miles

The Sycamore was

approximately 975 miles

from the wreckage

at 10:54 a.m. Wednesday.

CANADA

North Atlantic

Ocean

Ann Harvey and

Terry Fox at

around 11:00 a.m.

Wednesday

Newfoundland

U.S.

The Polar Prince, John Cabot

and three other vessels

were within 26 miles

of the wreckage by around

11:00 a.m. Wednesday.

Glace Bay at

10:50 p.m. Tuesday

The Titanic wreckage

sits on the ocean

floor, approximately

12,500 feet down.

Atalante at

11:09 a.m.

Wednesday

200 miles

Sources: United States Coast Guard, MarineTraffic, GEBCO

Note: All times are in Eastern. Data as of 11:30 a.m.

The U.S. Coast Guard said on Tuesday that several more vessels were on their way to assist in the search for the Titan submersible, including its ship the Sycamore and a Canadian Coast Guard vessel, John Cabot. The French government said on Tuesday that it was also sending a research vessel, the Atalante, which is equipped with an exploration robot, to help with the search. They will join the M.V. Polar Prince and Deep Energy, a pipe-laying vessel flagged in the Bahamas.

The Polar Prince deployed the Titan submersible on Sunday and has been searching the area since losing contact with it less than two hours later. Deep Energy arrived at the scene earlier on Tuesday and launched a remotely-operated vehicle, or R.O.V., to aid in the search, the Coast Guard said. American and Canadian aircraft have also been scanning the search area by sight and radar, and have deployed sonar buoys.

Vjosa Isai

Canada is sending additional vessels to assist with the search, the Department of National Defence said Tuesday afternoon. A Royal Canadian Navy ship equipped with a hyperbaric recompression chamber, used to treat diving-related illness, and a dive medicine team are headed to the scene, along with an additional Canadian Coast Guard ship poised to arrive later today.

Emma Bubola

Stockton Rush, the pilot of the lost vessel and chief executive of the company that operates it, is “absolutely passionate about what we can learn in the oceans,” said Craig Howard, a longtime friend, adding that Rush has taken great risks to bring “the ocean to all of us through the eyes of the few who could ever make the journeys.”

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

A spokesman for OceanGate confirms that Stockton Rush, its chief executive, was piloting the company's vessel that is lost in the North Atlantic. All five occupants have now been identified.

Alex Marshall

James Cameron, the Academy Award-winning movie director behind “Titanic,” knows about the risks of deep ocean exploration. A seasoned underwater explorer himself, in 2012 he prepared to plummet nearly seven miles to the world’s deepest known ocean trench.

“You’re going into one of the most unforgiving places on earth,” he said in an interview with The New York Times shortly before setting off: “It’s not like you can call up AAA to come get you.”

Yet he wanted to take the risk. Seeing things “human beings have never seen before,” he said that year in another interview, was more thrilling than filmmaking. “Forget about red carpets and all that glitzy stuff,” he added.

This week, in the days since a submersible vessel carrying five people disappeared on an expedition to see the Titanic’s remains, many movie fans have been waiting for Cameron to give his take on the situation.

Cameron’s 1997 movie “Titanic,” which made over $2 billion at the box office to become one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, reinvigorated interest in the tale of the ill-fated luxury liner, feeding the mystique that spurs some wealthy experience chasers to head miles underwater to see the wreckage site. Cameron has made dozens of visits to that spot in the North Atlantic, and knows the terrain well.

Cameron did not immediately respond to a request for comment made through Disney, which distributed his most recent film, “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

But in past interviews, Cameron has revealed many of the psychological factors that drive explorers to visit shipwrecks, despite the risks, and has also explained why adventurers feel the need to see the Titanic’s ruins with their own eyes.

“I love shipwrecks,” he said in a documentary released with a DVD edition of “Titanic,” and R.M.S. Titanic was “the ultimate wreck.”

Cameron has said that, as a boy, he became obsessed with heading deep below the sea. “I can think of no greater fantasy than to be an explorer and see what no human eye has seen before,” he said in a 2011 Times interview.

In 1988, while making “The Abyss,” about a drowned nuclear submarine, Cameron learned to operate a remotely piloted submersible. Then, in 1995, before he had even written the “Titanic” script, he visited the ship’s wreck to film it for that movie.

Cameron captured the footage by going underwater in Russian-owned submersible vessels. His brother, Michael, a mechanical engineer, constructed a special casing for a 35-millimeter movie camera so that it could withstand the water pressure at two-and-a-half miles below sea level.

In the years since, the director has repeated that trip to the Titanic wreckage and become a major figure in the field of deep sea exploration. “I’ve owned and operated my own submarines and pretty much know everybody in the deep-ocean world outside of the oil business,” he told The Times in 2010. That year, he brought together a panel of underwater technology experts to advise the Obama administration on dealing with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Cameron also directed the documentary features “Deepsea Challenge 3D,” about a 2012 trip to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, and “Aliens of the Deep,” an exploration of the strange, subaquatic creatures that live in the ocean’s depths.

In February, he released “Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron,” a documentary streaming on Hulu, which tries to answer some frequently debated fan questions about the movie, including whether the characters Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) could have survived by climbing onto a wooden door that floats in the ocean in a key scene.

Such thought experiments are worthwhile, Cameron says in the documentary. “If nothing else, it gives you an appreciation of what those people went through,” he said.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Jenny Gross and Anna Betts

Years before OceanGate’s submersible craft went missing in the Atlantic Ocean with five people onboard, the company faced several warnings as it prepared for its hallmark mission of taking wealthy passengers to tour the Titanic’s wreckage.

It was January 2018, and the company’s engineering team was about to hand over the craft — named Titan — to a new crew who would be responsible for ensuring the safety of its future passengers. But experts inside and outside the company were beginning to sound alarms.

OceanGate’s director of marine operations, David Lochridge, started working on a report around that time, according to court documents, ultimately producing a scathing document in which he said the craft needed more testing and stressed “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths.”

Two months later, OceanGate faced similarly dire calls from more than three dozen people — industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers — who warned in a letter to its chief executive, Stockton Rush, that the company’s “experimental” approach and its decision to forgo a traditional assessment could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission.

Now, as the international search for the craft enters another day, more is coming to light about the warnings leveled at OceanGate as the company raced to provide extreme tourism for the wealthy.

A spokesman for OceanGate declined to comment on the five-year-old critiques from Mr. Lochridge and the industry leaders. Nor did Mr. Lochridge respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Rush, the company’s chief executive, is one of the passengers on the vessel and was serving as its pilot when it went missing on Sunday, the company said on Tuesday.

An aerospace engineer and pilot, he founded the company, based in Everett, Wash., in 2009. For the past three years, he has charged up to $250,000 per person for a chance to visit the wreckage of the Titanic, which sank in 1912 on its inaugural trip from England to New York.

The critiques from Mr. Lochridge and the experts who signed the 2018 letter to Mr. Rush were focused in part on what they characterized as Mr. Rush’s refusal to have the Titan inspected and certified by one of the leading agencies that do such work.

Mr. Lochridge reported in court records that he had urged the company to do so, but that he had been told that OceanGate was “unwilling to pay” for such an assessment. After getting Mr. Lochridge’s report, the company’s leaders held a tense meeting to discuss the situation, according to court documents filed by both sides. The documents came in a lawsuit that OceanGate filed against Mr. Lochridge in 2018, accusing him of sharing confidential information outside the company.

In the documents, Mr. Lochridge reported learning that the viewport that lets passengers see outside the craft was only certified to work in depths of up to 1,300 meters.

That is far less than would be necessary for trips to the Titanic, which is nearly 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface.

“The paying passengers would not be aware, and would not be informed, of this experimental design,” lawyers for Mr. Lochridge wrote in a court filing.

The meeting led OceanGate to fire Mr. Lochridge, according to court documents filed by both sides. OceanGate has said in court records that he was not an engineer, that he refused to accept information from the company’s engineering team and that acoustic monitoring of the hull’s strength was better than the kind of testing that Mr. Lochridge felt was necessary.

The company said in its lawsuit that it appeared Mr. Lochridge was trying to be fired. Mr. Lochridge responded by alleging wrongful termination. The legal battle ended in a settlement later in 2018.

The separate warning that OceanGate received that same year came from 38 experts in the submersible craft industry; all of them were members of the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society, a 60-year-old industry group that promotes, studies and teaches the public about ocean technology. The experts wrote in their letter to Mr. Rush that they had “unanimous concern” about the way the Titan had been developed, and about the planned missions to the Titanic wreckage.

The letter said that OceanGate’s marketing of the Titan had been “at minimum, misleading” because it claimed that the submersible would meet or exceed the safety standards of a risk assessment company known as DNV, even though the company had no plans to have the craft formally certified by the agency.

“Their plan of not following classification guidelines was considered very risky,” Will Kohnen, the chairman of the committee, said in an interview on Tuesday.

The industry leaders said in their letter that OceanGate should, at minimum, test its prototypes under the watch of DNV or another leading certification company.

“While this may demand additional time and expense,” the signatories wrote, “it is our unanimous view that this validation process by a third-party is a critical component in the safeguards that protect all submersible occupants.”

Mr. Kohnen said that Mr. Rush called him after reading the letter and told him that industry standards were stifling innovation.

In an unsigned 2019 blog post titled “Why Isn’t Titan Classed?,” the company made similar arguments. OceanGate said in the post that because its Titan craft was so innovative, it could take years to get it certified by the usual assessment agencies. “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” the company wrote.

Another signatory of the 2018 letter, Bart Kemper, said in an interview that OceanGate had avoided having to abide by certain U.S. regulations by deploying the vessel in international waters, where Coast Guard rules did not apply.

“This letter was basically asking them to please do what the other submarines do, especially the passenger ones,” said Mr. Kemper, a forensic engineer who works on submarine designs.

Submersibles, unlike boats and other vessels, are largely unregulated, particularly when they operate in international waters, said Salvatore Mercogliano, an associate professor of maritime history at Campbell University in North Carolina.

Because the Titan is loaded onto a Canadian ship and then dropped into the North Atlantic near the Titanic, he said, it does not need to register with a country, fly a flag or follow rules that apply to many other vessels.

“It’s kind of like a boat on the back of a trailer,” Mr. Mercogliano said. “The police will ensure the trailer meets the requirements to be on the road, but they really won’t do a boat inspection.”

The Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which regulates submersibles that carry passengers and requires that they be registered with the Coast Guard, does not apply to the Titan because it does not fly an American flag or operate in American waters, he said.

Mr. Rush has spoken publicly in the past about what he viewed as regulatory red tape in the industry.

“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years,” he told Smithsonian magazine in a profile published in 2019. “It’s obscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations.”

In a CBS report last year, David Pogue, a former New York Times technology columnist, joined one of OceanGate’s Titanic expeditions and said the paperwork that he signed before getting onboard warned that the Titan was an “experimental vessel” that had not been “approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, emotional trauma or death.”

OceanGate has made two previous expeditions to the Titanic site, in 2021 and 2022, and said in a May blog post that it “always expects new challenges” with each trip. “We’re starting our Titanic Expedition earlier than usual and have been tracking all the social media posts showing icebergs and sea ice in the area,” the post read.

The earlier trips, while largely successful, were not without problems.

In February, a couple in Florida sued Mr. Rush, saying that his company refused to refund them the $105,000 that they each paid to visit the Titanic on the Titan in 2018. The trip was postponed several times, according to the suit, in part because the company said it needed to run more tests on the Titan. The couple claimed that Mr. Rush reneged on his promise of giving them a refund and that the company instead demanded that they participate in a July 2021 voyage to the wreckage.

The lawsuit is pending and Mr. Rush has not responded to it. Court records do not list a lawyer representing him in that case.

In a court filing last year, OceanGate referenced some technical issues with the Titan during the 2021 trip.

“On the first dive to the Titanic, the submersible encountered a battery issue and had to be manually attached to its lifting platform,” the company’s legal and operational adviser, David Concannon, wrote in the document, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which oversees matters having to do with the Titanic. The submersible sustained modest damage to its exterior, he wrote, leading OceanGate to cancel the mission so it could make repairs.

Still, Mr. Concannon wrote in the filing, 28 people were able to visit the Titanic wreckage on the Titan last year.

Mr. Concannon invited the federal judge who was hearing the case, Rebecca Beach Smith, to join the company for an expedition, according to a separate filing, something the judge seemed interested in doing.

“Perhaps, if another expedition occurs in the future, I will be able to do so,” the judge wrote in May, adding that after many years of hearing cases about the Titanic wreckage, “that opportunity would be quite informative and present a first ‘eyes on’ view of the wreck site by the court.”

Kitty Bennett and Susan C. Beachy contributed research. Mike Baker and Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.

Emma Bubola and Anushka Patil

Hamish Harding, a British explorer aboard the submersible missing in the North Atlantic, acknowledged in a 2021 interview that he had taken on deep-sea missions in the past knowing that rescue would not be an option.

“If something goes wrong, you are not coming back,” he told the Indian newsmagazine The Week after he made a record-setting trip to Challenger Deep, the furthest depths of the Mariana Trench. At almost seven miles, the Mariana Trench is far deeper than the Titanic site that the submersible was set to visit, which is about two-and-a half miles down.

On the 2021 trip, Mr. Harding, a 58-year-old British businessman, and Victor Vescovo, an American explorer, set a Guinness World Record for the longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive. Their 4-hour, 15-minute dive also set a record for farthest distance traveled along the deepest part of the ocean.

“It was potentially scary, but I was so busy doing so many things — navigating and triangulating my position — that I did not really have time to be scared,” Mr. Harding told The Week.

The vessel used for the Challenger Deep dive had a four-day oxygen reserve, as well as water and emergency rations, but was traveling so deep that no other sub “is capable of going down there to rescue you,” he said.

Mr. Harding — the founder and chairman of Action Aviation, a sales and air operations company based in Dubai — has also made airborne adventures. He flew to space last summer on a mission by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company and holds a record for the fastest circumnavigation of Earth via both the geographic poles by plane. And in 2022, he helped an effort to reintroduce cheetahs to India.

Action Aviation called Mr. Harding “an extraordinarily accomplished individual who has successfully undertaken challenging expeditions,” in a statement on Tuesday. The company added, “We look forward to welcoming him home.”

Mr. Harding wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that he was proud to finally announce that he had joined OceanGate’s mission “on the sub going down to the Titanic.”

In an Instagram post with pictures of the submersible and of him signing a flag for the Titanic mission, Mr. Harding wrote that the group had sailed from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, on Friday, and was planning to start dive operations around 4 a.m. on Sunday.

Despite the winter being particularly hard in Newfoundland this year, “a weather window has just opened up,” he added.

On Monday, the president of The Explorers Club, a New York-based organization of which Mr. Harding was a board member, alerted the club’s membership to the disappearance of the submersible that was carrying Mr. Harding and four others.

“When I saw Hamish last week at the Global Exploration Summit,” wrote the club president, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, “his excitement about this expedition was palpable. I know he was looking forward to conducting research at the site.

“We all join in the fervent hope that the submersible is located as quickly as possible and the crew is safe.”

Jesus Jiménez

transcript

The Coast Guard has coordinated search efforts with the U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard, Air National Guard aircraft and the Polar Prince, which has searched a combined 7,600 square miles, an area larger than the state of Connecticut. Those search efforts have not yielded any results. Search efforts have continued through last night and today. Today, the vessel Deep Energy, 194-meter pipe-laying vessel arrived on scene with underwater ROV capability. They have rendezvoused with a vessel, Polar Prince and commenced and ROV dive at the last known of the position of the Titan and the approximate position of the Titanic wreck. This is a very complex search and the unified team is working around the clock to bring all available assets and expertise to bear as quickly as possible in an effort to solve this very complex problem. We know there’s about there’s about 40 hours of breathable air left based on that initial report. Again, that was just the initial report based on 96 hours. You’re talking about a search area that’s 900 miles east of Cape Cod, 400 miles south of St. John’s. So logistically speaking, it’s hard to bring assets to bear. It takes time. It takes coordination. And then we’re dealing with, you know, two pieces of — you’re dealing with a surface search and a subsurface search. And frankly, that makes it an incredibly complex operation.

The five people inside the submersible craft that disappeared in the North Atlantic during a visit to the Titanic wreckage site were believed to have roughly 40 hours of breathable air left, United States Coast Guard officials said Tuesday afternoon.

Speaking at a news conference in Boston, Capt. Jamie Frederick said that crews were “doing everything possible” as part of a “complex search effort.” But so far, he said, those efforts “have not yielded any results.”

Canadian and American aircraft continued to fly over the search area on Tuesday, and more were expected later in the day, Captain Frederick said, adding that officials were also working to determine what equipment was needed for the search.

The vast size and remoteness of the search location — an area bigger than Connecticut and about 900 miles off Cape Cod, Mass. — complicated how quickly additional equipment could respond, Captain Frederick said.

“Logistically speaking, it’s hard to bring assets to bear,” he added. “It takes time.”

While search crews were pressed for time and faced a number of challenges, Chief Petty Officer Robert Simpson, a Coast Guard spokesman, said that crews were aided by improving visibility in the area after heavy fog on Monday.

Petty Officer Simpson said that waves in the area were about five to six feet with winds at about 15 knots. The Coast Guard’s crew members involved in the search were “specialized” to operate in this type of environment, he said.

Even so, he stressed the scope of the challenge rescuers faced. It’s difficult “to truly understand the scale of how far away this is,” he said.

Coast Guard crews have not ruled out the possibility that the vessel could be on the surface, which would mean aircraft flying over the area could spot it.

“If it’s on the surface, we’re fairly sure we’re going to be able to find it,” Officer Simpson said.

Judson Jones

Weather conditions in the area of the search for the missing submersible have improved since this morning, when a storm system southeast of Newfoundland was generating fog and waves up to 9 feet. Winds will stay about 10 to 20 miles per hour out of the west today but turn stronger and out of the northwest on Wednesday, which could increase wave heights until early Thursday. Fog could also return this evening into Wednesday morning, but was less likely on Thursday.

Jesus Jimenez

That’s a wrap on the Coast Guard news conference. To recap: The search continues, and crews are up against the clock with an estimated 40 hours of breathable air left inside the missing submersible. Aircraft are currently searching the area where it disappeared, and more are expected later today as officials work to determine what kind of equipment might be needed for a rescue effort.

Jenna Russell

The Coast Guard said visibility in the area where the submersible was lost was increasing today, after heavy fog yesterday. “If it’s on the surface, we’re fairly sure we’re going to be able to find it,” a spokesman said.

Jenna Russell

Stressing the complexity of the effort, the distance that rescue teams need to travel to reach the remote area where the submersible went missing, and the logistics involved in combining surface and undersea searches, Capt. Frederick called it a “unique” and “challenging” rescue operation, which is now focused on getting assets in place “as fast as we can.”

Jenna Russell

When asked if the passengers on the submersible could be rescued, Capt. Frederick said an “unwavering effort” continues to locate the submersible, and if it is found, teams will assess next steps. “Our nation’s best experts” are involved in the search, he said.

Jesus Jimenez

Capt. Jamie Frederick of the Coast Guard said that based on initial estimates of air supply, about 40 hours of breathable air are left in the vessel.

Jenna Russell

More aircraft are scheduled to join the search on Tuesday afternoon, Capt. Frederick of the Coast Guard said, and the Navy is working to bring more diving assets to the area.

Jenna Russell

Capt. Jamie Frederick said the Coast Guard’s search and rescue operation is “doing everything possible” as part of a “complex search effort” in an area the size of Connecticut, 900 miles off Cape Cod, but search efforts “have not yielded any results.”

Jesus Jimenez

We’re standing by to hear from Capt. Jamie Frederick of the U.S. Coast Guard at a news conference in Boston for updates on the missing submersible.

Jesus Jimenez

Capt. Frederick is now speaking and said he will provide updates for the next 24 hours of the search.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Jenny Gross

Leaders in the submersible vehicle industry sent a letter to OceanGate’s chief executive, Stockton Rush, in 2018 warning that “the current ‘experimental’ approach” of the company could result in problems, “from minor to catastrophic.” The letter was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by one of the signatories. It was not immediately clear whether Oceangate had responded.

Emma Bubola

The British businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, are aboard the missing submersible, according to a statement from the Engro Corporation, based in Karachi, Pakistan.

The elder Mr. Dawood, a scion of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families, is a vice chairman of Engro and has a background in textiles and fertilizer manufacturing. He has served on boards of directors in a variety of industries, according to the World Economic Forum website.

He is also a member of the Global Advisory Board for Prince’s Trust International, King Charles III’s charity. His father, Hussain, was one of the charity’s founding patrons, the trust said in a statement.

Mr. Dawood and his son are British subjects. Mr. Dawood and his wife, Christine, also have a daughter, Alina.

“We are shocked by this awful news, praying for a rescue and sending our thoughts to his family during this deeply challenging time,” Will Straw, the chief executive of Prince’s Trust International, said in a statement.

According to a post on the website of the SETI Institute, a scientific organization where Mr. Dawood is a trustee, the businessman is an ardent animal lover. The Engro Corporation said his interests include photography, especially wildlife photography, and exploring different natural habitats.

The company said Suleman Dawood is a big fan of science fiction literature, plays volleyball and takes a keen interest in solving Rubik’s Cubes.